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‘I have killed my books’

The following story by Linda Grant about culling her library in a move, fills me with superstitious fear.

I go to my own shelves and gaze upon them, trail possessive hands over the jumbled ranks of Le Guin, Gaiman, Galsworthy, Undsett, Andric, Kay, Tolkien, Lewis, Wilde, Twain, Carroll, Penman, Asimov, Bradbury, Zelazny, Sienkiewicz. I love these things. I love them as though they live and breathe… and for me, of course, they do… If I ever leave this house and move to a place that is smaller and more cramped with no room for my books I will feel as though I buried a legion of friends, and nothing will do but mourning.

Why did Grant kill her books? She talks about the heartbreaking task in a Guardian piece.

“… here was evidence of how I constructed my own intellectual history through reading. Here is Proust. Here is Jean Rhys. Here is Milton. Here isn’t Henry James because I have never been able to remember the beginning of his sentences by the time I get to the end. Here is JK Rowling. Here is Jilly Cooper. This is a library that tells …that doesn’t conceal the shameful reads, the low taste. Here are first editions, bought at abe.com, of my childhood favourites…”

When young women leave college, Bryce Covert reports at The Nation, they move into a workplace that is tilted against them from the very beginning.

They will make less than their male classmates in their first job, no matter what school they went to, major they chose, grades they got or job they took. That wage gap will continue to grow as their careers advance.

Women may not even be able to get hired into the jobs they want just because of their gender. When prospective employers only knew someone’s gender, they were twice as likely to hire a man for a job in mathematics, assuming that the women would perform worse on a test problem without even seeing the results.

One of the best things about having nieces, Elisabeth Donnelly writes at Flavorwire, is the chance to buy books for them, be it something like Anne of Green Gables or the collected works of E. Lockhart, who writes with a distinctly feminist viewpoint in the young adult genre. There’s something thrilling about reading books when you’re young and looking for how to be in the world; here are 15 feminist-leaning books that could inspire girls — and grown women — to take over the world.

Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce

Pierce specializes in wild fantasy with feminist themes, and in this first book in a series, a 13-year-old girl who can talk to the animals and breaks horses has to fight in a war.

I loved The Gilmore Girls in the first season. It was fresh and funny and the writing was superb. I lost interest after that, but it went on for years and was quite popular AND it featured a teen who loved books.

In Rory’s “valedictorian speech,” Krystie Lee Yandoli reports in BuzzFeed, she discussed her love of reading:

“I live in two worlds, one is a world of books. I’ve been a resident of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina and strolled down Swann’s Way. It’s a rewarding world.”

Warner Bros. Television / Via lessonstobelearned462.wordpress.com

Australian writer Patrick Lenton compiled a massive list of every single book that was referenced in the Gilmore Girls series, and set out to read each one in an attempt to complete what’s known as the “Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge.” He is currently on book number 18.

Even the best novels get rejected by publishers who don’t understand their brave new worlds. But some authors wind up rejecting their own books. Here are 10 great authors who disowned their own creations after they’d already seen the light of day.

Octavia Butler, Survivor: This 1978 novel is the only one of Butler’s works to remain out of print. She disowned it and let it stay buried, because she felt it depended on the worst cliches of science fiction.

Kafka, almost everything: When, a few years before his death, Kafka asked his good friend Max Brod to destroy all his papers, besides the few short works with which Kafka was satisfied, Brod responded, “If you seriously think me capable of such a thing, let me tell you here and now that I shall not carry out your wishes.” Nevertheless, when Kafka died he left Brod a letter asking him to destroy his fiction, diaries, and correspondence. Brod remained true to his word: he proceeded to publish everything he could get his hands on.